Christmas 2016

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Droeges!For Christmas, we decided to go to the beach. We drove down to Seaside, Oregon. It rained, snowed and the sun shone during the drive. When we arrived, we found a beautiful, clean and sandy beach.

We didn't get snow for Christmas, but we had snow the week before Christmas. The trees around our community are quite tall and beautiful when they catch the snow.

We haven't unpacked everything, but we found the Christmas stuff and decorated our new home for the holidays.

The week before Christmas, we went over to Seattle and visited the Gingerbread displays. The theme this year was "Harry Potter". This is a fund-raiser for childhood diabetes.

On our first beach walk in Seaside, we were greeted with a lovely rainbow as the weather changed from rain to sun. It's a good thing the sun came out, because it was so cold that the sand was frozen all the way out to the ocean. Our hotel was only two blocks from the beach.

This is what the beach looks like from Seaside Cove on the south end. There were surfers out in the cove! We saw surfers at Christmas in the Atlantic Ocean near Lisbon, Portugal, but it wasn't this cold.

In Seaside we found the Lewis & Clark Salt Works exhibit. This is where they made salt for about five weeks over 200 years ago. They built a stone oven, cut a LOT of firewood and put buckets of sea-water on it and boiled out the water. On our way home, we also stopped and visited Fort Clatsop near Warrenton, Oregon. This is where the expedition spent the winter before starting back to Missouri.

Christmas Eve we went and visited the tourist gift shops that were open. This is the carousel in the Seaside Carousel Mall downtown. The building used to be a dance hall.

On Christmas Day we went bird-watching around Seaside. We visited Mill Pond, Seaside Cove, Neawanna Creek and the Necanicum Estuary.

In the evening on our way to dinner, we took this picture of the decorations. We used to do this every year in Europe.

We left the big Christmas tree at the house and took this little one along. We won it at a pot luck at the SEA Discovery Center in Poulsbo, WA, where Alonda volunteers.

We hope you all have a great holiday season and a wonderful 2017!

Olympic National Park

Alonda's college friend Elyse and her husband John visited us in August. We took them up to Olympic National Park for three days. Our first stop was the "wettest place on earth," the Hoh Rain Forest. This place holds the world record for rainfall. It was, of course, clear and sunny the entire time. Here we are next to the Hoh River. 

We then drove the 20 odd miles to the Pacific Ocean. This is Kalaloch beach. Try to imagine the storm that piled up those logs.

This is the group of all four of us at Kalaloch overlooking the beach.

Alonda and Elyse enjoyed walking the clean, flat, sandy beach. The beach is almost perfect for lazing in the sun and swimming, but if you notice what they are wearing in August, you will know why no one was swimming.

This is Marymere Falls. Elyse wanted to visit waterfalls in the Pacific Northwest, so we visited three of them. 

John and Elyse are from Illinois. They spent a lot of time looking up at the Western Cedar, Douglas Fir and Western Hemolock trees.

This photo was the morning we went up Hurricane Ridge. This is near the Visitor Center and you can see the morning fog mixed with smoke from one of the wildfires. The fires were not set, they were from lightning or other natural causes. Forests actually benefit from an occasional fire, since it burns out the underbrush and renews the soil.

We all hiked up to the top of Hurricane Hill.

This is the view from Hurrican Hill. Some "hill"! This is looking north. The town below us is Port Angeles and the water is the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Pacific Ocean is just to your left and across the water, you are looking at Canada.

We missed our twice weekly yoga classes, so Jim did a tree pose next to a tree.

This is Sol Duc Falls. It is also the site of a natural hot springs. The National Park hot springs hotel and resort burned down in 1914 and was just rebuilt two years ago.

This is Madison Falls. It feeds the Elwha River which flows into Crescent Lake. This falls was less the 100 meters from the parking lot and was the easiest one to reach!

The company was excellent, the weather perfect and the scenery spectacular! If you haven't visited a National Park recently, we highly recommend it!

New house

 We have a new house! We moved to a 55+ community to a manufactured home which is all one level and has a ramp up to the front door.
  This house is only about 4 miles from our old condo.

We actually got the keys on August 12 and have been moving and unpacking ever since.

25th Anniversary

For our 25th Wedding Anniversary, we decided to celebrate with a Caribbean Cruise. We sailed with Norwegian Cruise Lines on the "Star" out of Tampa. We chose this line and ship because of the itinerary. Our research told us to not sail out of Galveston due to fog delays. Alonda also wanted to go to Florida to visit her grandfather's grave site in Tampa and to see a nephew in Lake Worth. We had no delays and were able to visit all ports of call (Honduras, Belize and Mexico). Fortunately, we also had no illness on the boat.

This is a photo of the skyline of Tampa as we were leaving the port. The weather in Florida was nice, but could have been a little warmer.

The ship went under the Sunshine Skyway Bridge as we left Tampa Bay and entered the Gulf of Mexico. This was going to be our first night on board and we spent the next full day at sea.

This was the Atrium. It is the main entrance to the ship and has elevators, a coffee/piano bar and the guest services. This was also one of several areas with live music several times a day throughout the cruise.

This the Spinnaker Lounge. It was used for games, evening music and dancing and large meetings. It was on deck 6 at the back of the ship. Sometimes when we were dancing, the ship would roll a bit and we would wind up dancing uphill or downhill.

Of course the ship has pools, water-slides and Jacuzzis. The water was all saltwater and Alonda said the pool was too cold. We didn't try the water-slides. There were sundecks all around the pool areas and on the top deck at the back of the ship. This was another area with live music several times a day. There were two bars and a buffet here, too.

This is the Deck 6 Promenade. You could walk along the ship's rail, sit on a lounger in the shade, play shuffleboard, play mini-golf or use the driving range, or shoot baskets on a small basketball court. This was a very windy area.

This was the Versailles Dining Room. It was our favorite restaurant. They recommended reservations, but we found out if you are only two people, you just show up and they always had room. Groups needed a reservation. We did have a reservation for our anniversary (15 Feb), they gave us a special cake and the servers came by to sing to us. 

  For breakfast, we went up on deck 12 for the buffet. It had 7 areas (not all different) and a good view from the side windows.

This our hallway. We lived on deck 10, a little forward of the middle of the ship. This hallway was well over 200 yards long. The ship had 3 banks of elevators for the guests and we saw several more sets of elevators for the crew. If you got lost, you could look at the carpet. It had fish on it and the fish always swam toward the front of the ship (except for a few red salmon).

We had our anniversary picture taken. There were professional photographers down by guest services for most of the cruise. No one dressed up for the first night on board (Valentine's Day), but everyone dressed up for the second evening. They may not have had their luggage for Valentine's Day.

Roatan, an island off Honduras, was our first port of call. The ship's "Shopping Advisors" said the ship would dock at 9 am. They were right!

This is the tourist shopping area at the dock. We didn't tour the island, but there doesn't seem to be much there. A bus took us from the dock to another dock to board our snorkeling catamaran.

Here we are, on the catamaran! The catamaran crew took at least a hundred pictures and put them on FaceBook and sent us the link.

Here we are, snorkeling!  The water was very clear and the temperature was very comfortable. The reef was very clean, but not as colorful as where we went in the Red Sea. We took some pictures with disposable underwater cameras, but they are not back from the developer, yet.

  We were both wearing T-shirts to help make sure we didn't get sunburned.The yellow things are inflatable vests they required everyone to wear so they could keep track of us. They weren't very comfortable. 

  They served a surprisingly good lunch on the boat on the way back to the dock. Chicken, beans and rice and a pasta salad. You could have all the alcohol you wanted, but they wouldn't serve any of it on the way out to go snorkeling.

  We had a really nice time on the snorkeling boat.

Our next port of call was Belize. This is NOT our ship. There is no wharf at Belize big enough for the cruise ships. They send out small boats (tenders) to pick up the tourists and take them to Belize City. We stayed on board until all the people who had signed up for tours had been taken ashore first.

This is the flag of the country of Belize.

This is the Belize City fishing fleet. We walked by it going into town and again on the way back to the tourist enclave.

  There were literally 2000 tourists on our ship and there were three ships there at one time. The other two ships probably had 4000 tourists per ship. When we got ashore, we just walked up to the gate of the tourist compound and they opened the door and we walked out. No passport; no ID check (we DID have our ship ID and driver's licenses); no visa; no immunizations. When we originally boarded the ship in Tampa, they did passport checks. Every time we left or boarded the boat, we had to punch in with our ship ID. They had a scanner for luggage and shopping bags every time we boarded the ship. They told us that if you missed the boat, they wouldn't wait, but they would tell the local authorities you were missing.

This is the throbbing heart of downtown Belize City. It actually reminds us of Bremerton. You can get off the boat and walk around the downtown in less than an hour. The store in the photo, Brodies, is a grocery store. We went in to buy chocolate and hot sauce.

This is the major government building in Belize City. It is on a nice square.

This is the local Presbyterian Church in Belize City, next to the Government building. Many of the buildings in tropical regions are painted in pastels, like this one.

Our next stop was Costa Maya, Mexico. Costa Maya is an island south of the Yucatan Peninsula.

This is the tourist area in Costa Maya. You can see the wharf leading in to it. The little red trolley is for the tourists to ride in from the ship, but it was an easy walk. This picture was taken from our balcony.

This is the beach area on Costa Maya. Costa Maya is actually an island which is built up for the tourists to visit.

Our last stop was Cozumel. Cozumel is different from Costa Maya because if there were no tourists, Cozumel would still exist. It has a port, ferry terminal, airport, commercial center, downtown and (of course) tourist shops.

This is our ship, docked at Cozumel. There were two other ships in port, but we had the best docking location. The water here was this beautiful aquamarine and blue throughout our trip. The weather cooperated the whole time, too.

This is the city square in the middle of Cozumel. It was a large, pedestrian only zone and very pleasant to walk through.

  We very much enjoyed Cozumel. The tourist shops were nice. The restaurant where we ate lunch was very good and had a mariachi band that serenaded us. We also stopped for coffee at a Starbucks. It had a second floor area that overlooked the harbor. It very much reminded us of the Starbucks in Jeddah. We would go there on Thursday (Saudi Arabian weekend) and sit and watch the waves. We stopped and bought water at a Mexican store that was pretty much like Costco.

Here is the bath towel art brigade. The maid would make a different one every evening and leave it on the bed. They were soooo cute!

This is the Norwegian "Star". Our cabin was on deck 10 of 13. The lowest we ever got was deck 3 for security and boarding.

This ship was parked next to ours one day. You can see the size of the people and get an idea of how tall these ships are.

We had a very nice time!